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At the May WTD meetup, Neal Kaplan gave a presentation titled Two Great Teams that Work Great Together: Bridging the Gap Between Documentation and Support. This post contains the audio and video recording of the presentation.

We recently hosted a Write the Docs meetup in Redwood City with a couple of excellent presenters. Recordings of their presentations are below. I also explain a bit about my new lapel mic and recording process.

Here are the slides for my STC Summit 2016 talk on Writing Tech Docs Like a Hacker with Jekyll presentation. In this presentation, I introduce the tech comm conference attendees to Jekyll and how it can be used for authoring technical documentation. I'll try to demo a few of the tasks I describe.

Here are my slides for the Documenting REST APIs workshop I'm giving at the 2016 STC Summit in Anaheim, California. The workshop lasts 3.5 hours. These slides cover a host of topics, including how to use APIs, how to document APIs, how to publish APIs, and more. There are lots of hands-on activities throughout. Some of the activities involve using the command line, the Chrome JavaScript Console, Postman, Git, reading JSON, and more.

I'm trying to come up with way of providing more context for users in documentation. Providing context is essential to helping users understand how all the various pieces fit together. Without context, the information becomes fragmented and seems unorganized, maybe even random. I've tried a couple of approaches to establishing context -- consolidating the information more while I draft it, and also putting maps with signposts throughout the content. I still have a ways to go to figure this out.

My slides and video for Jekyll Conf 2016 are available below. In this presentation, I talk about the various challenges I've had in using Jekyll for technical documentation. I explain my attempts to overcome requirements with everything from conditional filtering to generating PDFs, publishing across different environments, re-using content across projects, templatizing notes and alerts, and more.

I recently gave a lightning talk at a Write the Docs meetup in downtown San Francisco. My talk was titled Creating professional graphics in the easiest, simplest way possible. This post contains the slides, recordings, and other notes.

Today I was thinking about the most important element in a successful technical writing career, and I think it's knowledge. The more you know, the better information you can write. There are at least three main types of knowledge: product knowledge, technical knowledge, and user knowledge. Just knowing one of the three won't provide you with the kind of information you need to write good documentation.

Alicia Avrach, a content strategist at ThoughtSpot, gave a presentation about video documentation at a recent Write the Docs San Francisco meetup. In this presentation, Alicia covers all the aspects of video production, from scripting to recording, post-processing, publishing, and more.

Sanborn Hodgkins gave a presentation to the STC Silicon Valley chapter called Shape of a Modern Technical Communication Organization on April 18. In the presentation, she highlights the variety of roles — editor, videographer, information architect, content strategist, manager, writer, tools developer, and others — that tech comm organizations need to thrive.

To write documentation that users find helpful, you have to understand the mindset of someone who doesn't possess all the knowledge that you have. You have to understand what it's like not to know -- even not to know some of the most basic assumptions. Trying to capture this state of un-knowledge and remember all the questions you have is critical to writing documentation that speaks to this type of user.

Good documentation is hard to write for a number of reasons -- operating systems, versions, technical abilities, and business scenarios often differ between tech writers and users. Products often evolve after the doc was written, since tech writers aren't always integrated with the team through the life of the product. Support and feedback channels don't usually route to the doc source, crippling the writer from valuable feedback. Finally, steps are often inaccurate, and tutorials are often focused too narrowly on isolated tasks, without addressing more end-to-end scenarios.